GWT’s Bruce Johnson writes about GWT’s future, in light of the recent introduction of
Dart.
Quote:
We view Dart as an ambitious evolution of GWT’s mission to make web apps better for end users ... we anticipate working closely with the GWT developer community to explore Dart.
...
Key projects within Google rely on GWT every day, and we plan to continue improving (and open-sourcing) GWT based on their real-world needs.
I read three statements:
- Dart is better than GWT (or will be, eventually)
- Dart will be explored as a replacement for GWT
- GWT will continue to be improved
Dart seems like the logical successor to GWT: An improved version of Java that runs on its own virtual machine, but can also be compiled to JavaScript. However, with much legacy GWT code around, Google cannot simply abandon GWT. What I would like to see is a clear message: Is Dart a GWT replacement or not?
4 comments:
"an ambitious evolution of GWT’s mission" is not the same as your interpretation "the evolution of GWT". I read it as saying they have a common goal, and I am sure Google is big enough to have several competing approaches to solving the same problem.
True. I’ve updated the post accordingly.
"Dart seems like the logical successor to GWT"
=> I strongly disagree with that statement. GWT aims at developing web apps. It has one feature I find disgusting which is giving the impression to develop one single app (while web apps, when reaching a certain complexity, really should be considered as 2 apps, one client, one server). GWT is a framework.
On the other hand, Dart is a programming language. Dart's goal is clearly to replace JavaScript on the client side. There is a Dart-to-JS compiler, there is a native Dart interpreter on the way, but as far as we know, nothing dedicated for Dart on the server-side.
As explained in the keynote from Gilad Bracha on YouTube Dart seems to be an adaption of a type oriented system like Java with the long missed feature of defining something like closures. All other features making dynamic languages like Scala or even C# in the current 4.0 version are missing, especially mixins, PatternMatching, or the decision to an event driven architecture as provided by the google v8 engine. So Dart seems to be a solution to solve some of the ugly features of Javascript, like global vars, but only if all members of the developement team or some kind of audience will audit and review the codebase.!? It's still possible to declare vars and generate runtime errors. What about all these webkit-based browsers working on html5 with css3 and javascript? Wouldn't we like to have a solution regarding these things?
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